Desert Bus for Hope is kicking off its sixth year with more virtual driving, celebrity call-ins, and amazing auctions than you can shake a stick at.

The action begins 9pm Pacific time Friday, November 16th, and will go on for hours, days, even weeks, depending on the donations. For the more detail oriented, you can check out how the driving time correlates to the donation amount at the bottom of this page You can also see our Escapist call-in schedule here.

Last year, Desert Bus for Hope raised over $380,000 for Child's Play charity, which makes for some pretty big shoes to fill this year. Since its inception, Desert Bus has raised over $825,000, which puts them on track for breaking the $1 million mark this year!

In addition to all the auctions and live giveaways, for every Publisher's Club Membership purchased throughout the event, The Escapist will donate $10. This year, we are upping the ante by giving away prizes to Pub Club Members once the Bus has parked for the year, as our way of saying "Thank You" for supporting a great cause. Check out the gallery below to see all the awesome swag you could get your hands on, donated by the wonderful Desert Bus craft-along donors and our friends over at Ultimate Comics

The Walking Dead prize pack including one (1) copy of the official tabletop board game, one (1) Walking Dead calendar for 2013, and one (1) copy of the second Walking Dead novel, The Road to Woodbury.

I've been watching it for the first time too. The mayonnaise incident was hilarious.Shame I can't join the chat though, it breaks my browser (Firefox) when I try join it due to the sheer number of posts and people.

Arakasi:I've been watching it for the first time too. The mayonnaise incident was hilarious.Shame I can't join the chat though, it breaks my browser (Firefox) when I try join it due to the sheer number of posts and people.

Arakasi:I've been watching it for the first time too. The mayonnaise incident was hilarious.Shame I can't join the chat though, it breaks my browser (Firefox) when I try join it due to the sheer number of posts and people.

Arakasi:I've been watching it for the first time too. The mayonnaise incident was hilarious.Shame I can't join the chat though, it breaks my browser (Firefox) when I try join it due to the sheer number of posts and people.

If the site chat is not working for you (it surely doesn't work for me), you can connect to the chat server using any IRC program or browser addon (like the chatzilla already mentioned). The server is irc.desertbus.org with port 6667 (standard port for IRC servers). Just pick a nickname and connect, and you're in chat.